Google Reaches for the Stars, Takes You to Outer Space in Your Browser

You ready to space out? Literally? Google's got just the trick, and no, it's not another Doodle.

The company's creative lab has put together a new project called 100,000 Stars. Dubbed an "experiment," the search-engine giant has plotted 100,000 starts in an interactive map of outer space. Using imagery and data from NASA, the European Space Agency and other sources together with the Chrome browser's support for advanced web technologies (HTML 5, WebGL and CSS3D), the team was able to put together a beautiful site, which lets you pan and zoom around the stars closest to the sun. Zoom in on the stars, and you will see their names and more from Wikipedia, including just how hot it is with a color index map.

Of course, Google decided to focus only on 100,000 stars, not the billions out there. "As you explore this experiment, we hope you share our wonder for how large the galaxy really is. It's incredible to think that this mist of 100,000 measurable stars is a tiny fraction of the sextillions of stars in the broader universe," Google's Aaron Koblin said in a post on the company's Chrome blog.

The imagery is really stunning, but Google emphasizes that it's an artist's rendition. It shouldn't be seen as a scientific document, and the music by Sam Hulick, who composed tracks for video games, gives it a science fiction-like feel.

With that, we'll let you get out of here and go check it out yourselves here.